Is Oracle's Database Dominance Being Eroded by Cloud-First Rivals? (msn.com) 71
Shutterfly recently moved its photo libraries to Amazon's cloud division — and became one of the companies that stopped using Oracle for it database management, Bloomberg reports:
Businesses are opting to align with newer providers such as MongoDB Inc., Databricks Inc. and Snowflake Inc. instead of Oracle, the sector stalwart, as a result of changes across the enterprise technology landscape.
The move to the cloud is challenging the systems of the past. Newer providers are also making it much easier to adopt their technology directly, alleviating the need for corporate purchasers to negotiate large contracts with salespeople and allowing end users to more easily pick their own tools. Offerings from the newer software makers can also be deployed without large teams of database administrators that are typically needed to support Oracle's products, a cost-saver for organizations that would otherwise have to fight against other businesses for these in-demand engineers. The evidence of the shift is widespread. JPMorgan Chase & Co. chose Cockroach Labs Inc. as the database vendor to support its new retail banking application in Europe. Nasdaq Inc. is working with closely held Databricks and Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services, among others, in its quest to upgrade from on-premises Oracle data repositories. Alongside AWS, database products from rival cloud vendors Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud are also growing quickly. And many businesses, like JetBlue Airways Corp. and Automatic Data Processing Inc., are tapping Snowflake to help store and analyze corporate data to power sales dashboards, among other uses....
Collectively, the initiatives are just a small fragment of the estimated $155 billion database market. But it's evidence of a tectonic shift happening within the industry, one that is threatening the leadership status Oracle cultivated over the past 43 years, ever since co-founder Larry Ellison and his team brought to market the first relational database, or one in which information was organized in tables that could be more easily accessed, manipulated and analyzed.... Oracle doesn't disclose financial results specifically for its database business. Much of that revenue comes from providing support and maintenance for existing customers versus new sales. But Oracle's influence is slowly fading. While it owned an estimated 27% of the database market in 2019, that fell to 24% in 2020, per Gartner. In the same time frame, Amazon went from 17% market share to almost 21%.
Oracle declined to comment for this story. Rivals are growing quickly. At MongoDB, for example, sales rose 57% to $285 million in the most recent quarter. Those results, analysts and company executives say, indicate businesses are using MongoDB for increasingly larger projects.... Oracle makes a significant portion of its revenue on existing customers. Every few years, when companies have to renew their contracts, Oracle can raise prices for maintenance and support — a business with margins hovering around 95%, according to Craig Guarente, a 16-year veteran of Oracle who is now CEO and co-founder of consulting firm Palisade Compliance.
"The entire profit of the company comes from Oracle database maintenance," he said. With each contract negotiation, "you go from paying $20 million a year, to $30 million a year, to paying $50 million a year."
The move to the cloud is challenging the systems of the past. Newer providers are also making it much easier to adopt their technology directly, alleviating the need for corporate purchasers to negotiate large contracts with salespeople and allowing end users to more easily pick their own tools. Offerings from the newer software makers can also be deployed without large teams of database administrators that are typically needed to support Oracle's products, a cost-saver for organizations that would otherwise have to fight against other businesses for these in-demand engineers. The evidence of the shift is widespread. JPMorgan Chase & Co. chose Cockroach Labs Inc. as the database vendor to support its new retail banking application in Europe. Nasdaq Inc. is working with closely held Databricks and Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services, among others, in its quest to upgrade from on-premises Oracle data repositories. Alongside AWS, database products from rival cloud vendors Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud are also growing quickly. And many businesses, like JetBlue Airways Corp. and Automatic Data Processing Inc., are tapping Snowflake to help store and analyze corporate data to power sales dashboards, among other uses....
Collectively, the initiatives are just a small fragment of the estimated $155 billion database market. But it's evidence of a tectonic shift happening within the industry, one that is threatening the leadership status Oracle cultivated over the past 43 years, ever since co-founder Larry Ellison and his team brought to market the first relational database, or one in which information was organized in tables that could be more easily accessed, manipulated and analyzed.... Oracle doesn't disclose financial results specifically for its database business. Much of that revenue comes from providing support and maintenance for existing customers versus new sales. But Oracle's influence is slowly fading. While it owned an estimated 27% of the database market in 2019, that fell to 24% in 2020, per Gartner. In the same time frame, Amazon went from 17% market share to almost 21%.
Oracle declined to comment for this story. Rivals are growing quickly. At MongoDB, for example, sales rose 57% to $285 million in the most recent quarter. Those results, analysts and company executives say, indicate businesses are using MongoDB for increasingly larger projects.... Oracle makes a significant portion of its revenue on existing customers. Every few years, when companies have to renew their contracts, Oracle can raise prices for maintenance and support — a business with margins hovering around 95%, according to Craig Guarente, a 16-year veteran of Oracle who is now CEO and co-founder of consulting firm Palisade Compliance.
"The entire profit of the company comes from Oracle database maintenance," he said. With each contract negotiation, "you go from paying $20 million a year, to $30 million a year, to paying $50 million a year."
shocked (Score:5, Funny)
Re:shocked (Score:5, Insightful)
Many years ago, I worked for a company that partnered with Oracle on a software project. We provided Oracle with 20 workstations running our software to be used by their developers. After months of evasive emails and then silence, we learned they had done none of the work, and had wiped the machines and repurposed them. Basically, they just stole our equipment.
During the Obamacare rollout, the biggest and most expensive debacles were in states that had contracted with Oracle.
Oracle swindled California taxpayers out of $95M in a kickback scheme, one of the reasons for the recall of Gov. Davis.
Oracle is slime. I trust Microsoft more.
Re: shocked (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: shocked (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm among the many others who won't touch its products with someone else's 10 foot pole, unless required by an employer to do so, and, even then, under extreme protest.
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At this point I've directly and indirectly encountered so many tales of Oracle fuckery that I'd pretty much say [citation needed] if you claimed they didn't (yet) run over your dog.
I am astonished anyone still gives them money.
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That's pretty damning. It's like being the Mussolini (MS) of the Nazi era.
Oregon & Oracle Reach $100 Million Settlement (Score:2)
https://www.doj.state.or.us/me... [state.or.us]
That was 2016.
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At least not until they got the bill.
Lawyers (Score:2)
and their cheerful, flexible lawyers.
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Cue the audits in 3... 2... 1...
How is this news? (Score:3)
This question was raised about 20 years ago when Open Source databases went mainstream. The counter-arguments at the time were lack of stored procedures, among other features, and poor scalability of MySQL. Immaturity and custom syntax were cited for Postgres. Who is still arguing these points?
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. This shift has been going on for a long time now.
The only customers I've seen that used Oracle have moved away to other alternatives (esp. PostgreSQL) years ago. Often because of Oracle's hard handed actions.
I haven't seen as aggressive flight with MS SQL Server customers.
Oracle is becoming like IBM.. old large enterprises are stuck with it. But the younger, newer projects don't want anything to do with it.
Re: How is this news? (Score:3, Interesting)
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While MS SQL does have its problems, it is still much cheaper to use MS SQL vs Oracle. As well you have better overall support too.
Re: How is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have heard a lot of people complain about MSSQL license terms or did back in the 2000-early 2010s. However i think the criticism, unless you want to levy it at license strategies of the era more generally is unfair.
Reality is MSSQL like every other sound database engine of the era (Prostgres excepted) was expensive. Compared to most of the 'viable' competitors for larger deployments like Oracle, IBM, TD, etc MSSQL and Sybase were pretty darned affordable.
Where you got into trouble is MS offered some client-access-license models that made it VERY cheap to deploy SQLServer fro some use cases that fit the model. However it was easy to get outside what was allowed under those terms if you did not understand them and careful consider the design and workflow implications they were going to impose on what you were building; a few obvious system enhancements like what you describe could easily find you suddenly needing licenses for a whole lot of client devices. You might even describe the licenses as 'viral'; that said you could buy Enterprise or Datacenter license variants for a lot more $$ up front and avoid those problems, while still being quite a bit under the cost of "equivalent" alternative commercial offerings.
Reality is 15+ years ago high-end RDMS software was just plain expensive; as was the hardware you needed under it. Quite honestly I think some of the big guys shot themselves in the food because this - 1) spawned quite a lot FOSS work in the area that really did close quite a lot of the gap, 2) Justified a lot of the move to the cloud. How many license sales has Oracle lost to people moving work loads to RDS on AWS, I don't know but I bet its a lot.
Re: How is this news? (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft also had a far better product in SQL Server Express. Sure, Oracle has a free tier, but I've seen Access databases in excess of the limits Oracle imposes on their free version. It's basically there for college students to learn to code for OracleDB so they can do their classwork...and that's about it.
SQL Server Express is used pretty extensively for small business software. We had accounting firms running on databases well within the limits of SQL Server Express. Now, one could certainly argue that Microsoft isn't making money on Express, but it made it super easy for MS to sell the other pillars of the ecosystem - Windows Server, IIS, Visual Studio, and Office. Once you hit the limits, it was well within the realm of possibility for SQL Server Standard to exceed the cost of the Poweredge or Proliant it sat on.
SQL Server may not scale well to petabyte-sized databases, but Oracle doesn't scale down enough to have an onramp for smaller needs. Nobody is dealing with Oracle drama on a single server deployment, not the least of which because Oracle doesn't want to deal with 4-figure checks once every five years, they want six figure checks annually.
Once MySQL/MariaDB and Postgres started being viable options for low volume needs, and MS SQL Server found its niche in the midrange, Oracle was stuck with the high end clientele. They've done fine with that for some time, but as larger companies die out or restructure around different products, the number of potential Oracle customers become fewer and fewer. AWS provides an onramp. Microsoft provides an onramp. Oracle...doesn't.
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SQL Server Express can be a trap. You're limited as to (IIRC) database size, among other things. You don't typically have a choice but to upgrade to the full version if you hit those limits.
We do use it where I am for apps that will probably never come close to those limits, but if I had my way, most of our new systems going forward would be using PostgreSQL. It used to be a pain to install and run on Windows, but that was a long time ago, and, like most any civilized piece of server software, it can als
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SQL Server may not scale well to petabyte-sized databases,
Does anyone without sharding? At that point the indexes don't fit into RAM.
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Oracle XE is almost identical to MS SQL Express
Oracle has 12gb storage vs MS 10gb
Oracle has 2gb ram vs MS 1.4gb
Oracle has 2 core vs MS 1 socket 4 core
They both solely exist in the hope your usage will hit that limit and you will upgrade to a paid option.
Oracle Cloud offers 2 always free 20gb databases. MS Azure it is $4.90 for a 2gb cloud database($14.90 for the next cheapest option)
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You might not have heard it about MS SQL Server but has happened there too.
This used to be true if you used SQL+CAL licensing. But with 2019 Standard and higher you can license it per core instead, with no user and/or device limits. I think this was true as early as the 2016 versions. In fact, you have to specifically request the SQL+CAL licensing model now; which can be significantly cheaper if your using the database with a small number of users/devices like my company is.
You'll easily spend $14k for an 8-core license, but that's a one time cost; we'll maybe an every 3 year cost
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This used to be true if you used SQL+CAL licensing. But with 2019 Standard and higher you can license it per core instead, with no user and/or device limits. I think this was true as early as the 2016 versions.
Much, much older than that. SQL Server 7.0 IIRC, SQL Server 2000 definitely.
Their Server+CAL model was brutal, though-- any consumer of data from SQL Server no matter how far downstream had to have a CAL (i.e. if you emailed a report to a customer on the status of their project, and the data that was used for report generation resided in SQL Server, then your customer was technically required to have a CAL--and anyone they sent it to, in turn). It was a nightmarish situation.
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MS has or at least had some pretty bad terms in their licenses.
If you could get a clear picture from them on what the price actually is. I could talk to three different sales reps on how much a license would cost on a particular setup, and get three different answers. This isn't as big of a deal with their cloud offerings, though.
From the story:
Those results, analysts and company executives say, indicate businesses are using MongoDB for increasingly larger projects
If you jumped ship from Oracle to MongoDB, you shouldn't have been using an RDBMS to begin with, much less one as expensive as Oracle.
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Ummm, that's not true with free, oracle-owned MySQL which is very popular with website developers. MariaDB is a popular fork that has *nothing* to do with Oracle, and that's why it is trending in a big way for a while already. And it is not the only drop-in alternative.
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Yes. This shift has been going on for a long time now.
The only customers I've seen that used Oracle have moved away to other alternatives (esp. PostgreSQL) years ago. Often because of Oracle's hard handed actions.
I haven't seen as aggressive flight with MS SQL Server customers.
Oracle is becoming like IBM.. old large enterprises are stuck with it. But the younger, newer projects don't want anything to do with it.
That's the thing that keeps Oracle in business... once they're in it's near impossible to get Oracle out. So the rule is, don't let Oracle in, in the first place.
MS SQL licensing may be aggressive (though nowhere near as predatory as Oracle), but you get a product that is robust, easy to use and has actual support behind it.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am more surprised that Oracle is still getting new customers.
Over my past 25 years experience with with large scale database systems. The only reason why a company is using Oracle, is because they had it for 30+years and the cost of changing over to a new system is slightly more than the Oracle Licenses.
There were arguments in the past about why to choose Oracle. Support for High end systems, like Sun Micrososystems 64bit Sparc Ultra platform, and DEC. But sadly we are mostly just using Upgraded PC hardware now for servers, as the x86 Compatible CPU lineup is now 64bit, cheaper and performs satisfactory.
Then there was the Oracle is for Large Databases argument. Those the Databases with Tables that have Millions of Rows. Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and the Open Source DBs being newly designed and not a hold over of a 16bit design (Access, FoxPro, DBase) where Millions or billions of records none of these system really sweat on handling. Oracle may be able to handle even larger, however its theoretical maximum, is much larger than most Large organizations can handle, and only an Idiot DBA would put all their data on one Database, as if that database fails, then all the systems connected to it do as well.
Stored Procedures, and other advanced features, other will add if requested.
If starting or expanding a company, that didn't have Oracle already, I would be hard press to find a good reason to recommend to go that path.
I don't hate the Oracle Database, (I may have some issues with the company). But it is a hold over of a different era of computing.
Re:How is this news? (Score:4, Informative)
The rollouts of Oracle databases that I've worked with were not 'millions of rows'. They were billions, a Petabyte sized storages.
The thing is, a lot of the alternatives to Oracle simply don't do "Performance, Storage, Scalability" well anymore at that level.
Oracle has horrible licensing requirements, and is stupidly expensive. But if you really do need that level of performance, then there aren't a lot of alternatives.
IBM's DB2 is pretty much the same horrible licensing requirements and stupidly expensive..
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Also, I run Oracle ERP (recently moved to OCI) for a research organization that relies on federal grant accounting
Oracle ERP complies with the FED rules better than any other competitor out there and remains cost effective for us
I agree that running afoul of licensing agreements, or even dealing with support can be trying, but that is why organizations that rely on Oracle hire people like me
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Still billions of rows, can be handled with a modest SQL based database.
And even if Oracle is better then the others, the others are really good enough to do the work for fraction of the expense.
If you are going to have a shipping company, do you invest in a freight train industry, or semi truck, or smaller box trucks.
There are only a small number of rail fraight companies, they are often customers for a lot of rather large shipping companies. Because the large shipping companies cannot afford a train inf
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Oracle is a product of a different age. We much rather have smaller more numbers of databases that may talk to each other, then having a big monolith system. As having more smaller is cheaper now than one big system.
If you can get away with one big data tier how is the cost of that system more than the added overhead of dealing with piecemeal storage? There are significant bumps in complexity and inconvenience you now have to internalize. Even big hardware with lots of cores and fancy storage arrays is certainly way cheaper than the corresponding salaries.
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Still billions of rows, can be handled with a modest SQL based database.
MySQL or MariaDB using partitioning on the properly designed condition can swallow a lot. Regardless of database engine it all comes down to how good the database designer is - a skilled designer can do wonders on any database while a bad database model can kill the best database engine.
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Oracle RAC (or GRID, or whatever they call it now) is also pretty unique....it works better than MS SQL AlwaysOn clustering when it comes to horizontally scaled reads, and you don't have to use replication like you would with MySQL.
I don't know enough about PostGresQL to know what the options are for that.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I haven't tried them with tables having tens of millions of rows....
I maintain PostgreSQL databases with many tables in the 200M records range on VM's running on moderate hardware. With only judicious use of full and partial indexes (no partitioning or tablespaces) and generous memory allocated to the cluster, my typical transactional queries run in less than a millisecond. Most daily report queries run in a bit more than one second.
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Seconded. It's been a long time now since I encountered any relational database requirement for which PostgreSQL would not have been an acceptable, and in most cases the optimal, choice.
(For purposes of this discussion I'm ignoring situations where a non-relational DB might be the better approach. I don't run across too many of these in my line of work, but YMMV.)
Note: array-valued DB columns can be convenient, but they violate 1NF, which can result in issues. I'd use with extreme caution.
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Note: array-valued DB columns can be convenient, but they violate 1NF, which can result in issues. I'd use with extreme caution.
Point taken. But I love how you can also just unnest them into their own rows, as if they were another relational table! Postgres makes SQL programming a joy :-)
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Point taken. But I love how you can also just unnest them into their own rows, as if they were another relational table! Postgres makes SQL programming a joy :-)
This is always the problem with giving people what they want. They end up using hacks because it's easier to get away with instead of doing it right and properly designing a schema. Oh but I don't want to create a table just for that. Does this "unnesting" feature enforce DRI as well?
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My worry is what Oracle going down the tubes might mean for MySQL (and therefore MariaDB) and InnoDB.
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The last good version of an Oracle database engine was 7.2.3. From version 8 it became very bloated.
Now Oracle owns MySQL, but after that there was a fork to Maria DB so openness still lives.
However I do love the ability to do OS native indexed files in OpenVMS with the EDIT/FDL command. Unfortunately DEC didn't catch on the x86 bandwagon, but now it's slowly starting to come for x86 as OpenVMS E9.2 [vmssoftware.com] - something for the deep core enthusiasts.
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I really don't understand why so many companies do use Oracle. I can say that going back even 30 year ago, there were companies that really should not have been using Oracle.
These companies were paying a fortune for features that they would never use. They also did not have the skill level needed to be able to correctly maintain these Oracle systems, they would rely on Oracle support to get most of their basic tasks completed. Open source products would have been fine for most of the tasks these companies h
No (Score:5, Insightful)
It's being eroded by Oracle
They are known throughout the industry as assholes.
Now that there are many easier alternatives they are reaping what they have sown.
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The beatings will continue, until morale improves.
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Oracle: "Move fast and sue things" (Score:5, Informative)
I read Larry Ellison's biography "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison (God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison)"
He's one of the original "move fast and break things" style founders, but breaking things was baked into Oracle's culture even past start-up stage. Rumor has it Oracle has more lawyers than engineers.
One of their marketing tricks was to get their RDBMS to barely run on different OS's and claim they were multiplatform on dozens of OS's, which the competition couldn't keep up with. In practice, the versions for infrequently-used OS's were buggy as hell. On those OS's, Oracle RDBMS may start up and be able to run basic queries, but was otherwise buggy and/or slow as hell, lacking OS-specific tuning. "Run on many OS's" was a very loose application of "run".
But it was a smart idea to write most the RDBMS in C, and then adjust a copy for each OS. That was mostly unheard of in those days because assembly/machine language was often necessary for decent database performance, but the hardware was just getting fast enough in the 80's to make that viewpoint obsolete.
Using customers as unwitting beta testers was also common when they needed features as brochure bragging points against competition. They'd quietly let complaining customers install the older version. Some call this "brochure oriented programming".
And they had very in-your-face ads, showing competitors as obsolete airplanes crashing and burning. Oracle is Trump-esque. Ellison is Don with an IQ.
Ingres, their closest competitor, was technically better, but couldn't out-market Oracle, being run by logical academic types. QUEL, Ingres's query language, is considered better than SQL by relational purists, but Oracle liked to remind customers that SQL was backed by IBM, which mattered in the 80's. QUEL, not SQL, may have ended up the de-facto query standard today if not for Oracle's clever/slimy marketing.
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Indeed quel was better. I used it at university many, many years ago and never understood why people put up with SQL. Quel mapped to relational algebra so much better.
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SQL was easier to sell to non-technical managers: "Look, it reads like English!" COBOL was still popular at the time and made big bucks for IBM, so they figured if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and went COBOL-ish with their RDBMS query language choice.
COBOL actually was somewhat slow to catch on because it was a machine hog to compile. Although first released around 1961, It wasn't until the 70's it hit its full stride. The hardware caught up to the linguistic bloat.
Oracle's plan for us (Score:4, Informative)
From
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
Oracle is planning a database of all med. info on people in the U.S. And they've just completed gobbling Cerner, which makes hospital and health care systems (and their software sucks). Oracle promises to anonymize the data. Sure Oracle, we should trust Uncle Larry with our data? I don't think so.
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Arh yes! Trust Oracle with medical data and "anonymization".
Like we all forgot how Oracle force fed the uninstallable AskToolbar into peoples computers in a mandatory Java update.
That alone should prevent them from ever getting any new business.
Hmmm .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is Oracle's Database Dominance Being Eroded by Cloud-First Rivals?
I don't know but if it is, it could not possibly have happened to a more deserving abusive monopoly.
What dominance ? (Score:1)
Re: What dominance ? (Score:2)
I'm not sure, but I just got a job working on it, and another job I interviewed for would have been using it.
Medium size businesses (1000-10000 employees), one is the back end for a product being sold by the company, the other was an internal datastore.
This is 1/3 of the jobs I applied for at the entry level.
This is really sad (Score:3)
The "cloud" is terrible, and Oracle manages to make staying with them an even worse option. That's quite a performance - and a great loss to us all, as the last thing a free society needs is more cloud.
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With the cloud analogy, Oracle is a personal mist of sewage.
If the answer is "Yes", (Score:2)
then "YAY" for cloud-based DB's!
I'm usually wary of cloud-based solutions because they're a part of the "rent-to-not-own" landscape, and because I really want physical control over my own data as much as possible. But anything that threatens to drive a stake through Oracle's vampire heart has at least some of my support.
Wrong Answer (Score:3)
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Mongo works great at linear performance and if the sharding is done right, that's why it's popular. Need more capacity? just add a node or two. I can't really do that on a MySQL/MariaDB setup although I can certainly pay more for an RDS instance that supports more speed.
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I think the original comment is still valid - There's a difference in architecture that goes beyond scaling - starting with ACID vs. CAP as a fundamental change. If I need transactional boundaries then a web-scale DB is a hard sell, or at least requires a architectural shift. Back to topic tho- Replacement of Oracle isn't free, but neither is keeping it. I guess you need to decide where the tolerance for lawyers is...
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Mongo works great at linear performance and if the sharding is done right, that's why it's popular.
Mongo is popular because most people don't need to scale.
No by their sales people (Score:2)
and their attitude towards their customers. Great product to work with from a technical standpoint but being complete asshats when it comes to licensing etc. Sadly it seemed like Microsoft, decided that being asshats when selling SQL products are the way to be successful.
I think what everyone are trying, are to push people to their cloud solutions so they can make even more money(because people always underestimate the running costs of a cloud solution, due to much higher load, io, network traffic etc.)
Comment removed (Score:3)
Oracle has done well (Score:2)
Oracle has been extremely successful over the decades since it first came out in the late 70s. While their licensing and "audit" practices are predatory customers aren't running away from them until they start looking at re-architecting their applications. That's when Oracle gets nervous and starts doing the "me-too" dance. It's competition and it's made alternatives like Mongo or Cassandra viable because we start to break the SQL chains that have held us slaves to overpriced licenses and poorly performant
Oracle is a mature IP and Patent company now (Score:2)
politically vulnerable (Score:1)
Boo that !!
There is no dominance by Oracle (Score:2)
Oracle is already dead... more or less (Score:1)
we haven't deployed any oracle product for a new environment / installation in the last decade, in fact the customers are climbing over each other to get rid of them.
Oracle java -> openjdk & friends
Oracle DB -> postgres or MariaDB, depending on your needs.
It's two decades too late IMHO, but better late than never.